Let's hear it for truckers

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

< http://www.washingtonpost.com >
The Long Haul
Miserable hours. Low pay. Lonely existence. Why would anybody make a
living this way?

By Wells Tower
Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page W08


Arthur Mink has a remarkable alarm clock. It is an unassuming
rectangle of cheery lemon-yellow plastic about the size of a bar of
soap, but its ring is monstrously loud and shrill, a whooping shriek
that jolts the sleeper into an electrified, panicky sort of
consciousness, the kind of sound you might expect to hear if a cloud
of deadly gas were descending on your town. For Arthur Mink, it's a
sound that tells him to roll out of his bunk and pull his rig back on
the road. The alarm clock works like an egg timer; it ticks away the
seconds you've got left to sleep, but it does not, specifically, tell
time. Why should it? Long-haul truck drivers like Mink work days,
nights and times in between. His days follow no predictable rhythm.
There is no beginning, no end, and -- delivery deadlines aside -- no
point in putting a name on each hour as it passes. For men in Mink's
line of work, the hours fall into two simple categories: time at rest
and time in motion.

Mink's arm shot out from the bottom bunk and mashed a button to shut
up the alarm. He swung his legs out and shrugged on a red golf shirt
he'd left hanging on a hook the night before. He fiddled with his
shaving kit and the keen aroma of Old Spice overwhelmed the cab for a
brief instant. He took a comb from the cubby above the driver's side
sun visor and carved an orderly part into his silver hair. Then Mink,
57, drew back the heavy naugahyde curtains from the windshield, and
the cab filled up with the pale, reluctant light of morning.

Mink did not have far to go this day, 15 miles from the truck stop
parking lot where we spent last night to a drop lot (a temporary
stable for trailers en route to somewhere else) just south of
Richmond. The deadline for this particular load was not an urgent one,
but he decided to bring it in two hours early. "You never know what tr
affic will do," he said. "Traffic jams happen day and night on every
road in the country. It's just not something you can figure out a way
around."

But there was little traffic heading down Interstate 95 on this
Saturday morning -- not many 18-wheelers out, just a lot of cars, and
sitting high up in Mink's big truck, they looked small and pesky. "A
year, year and a half ago, 95 was choked with trucks, so many people
wanted freight moved," Mink said. "Plus gas was cheap and that was
good for everybody. But these days, on a Saturday? Most people are
back at the house."

We swept through downtown Richmond, past the milky face of the train
station clock tower that looms over the interstate. We rolled past a
crew of men at work, busy with a new highway overpass, a towering
concrete clove hitch of road dead-ending in midair.

Mink steered his rig off the interstate and pulled into a wide
driveway bordered by a high cyclone fence. We nosed through a
labyrinth of parked trailers to an empty spot, and Mink hopped out and
cranked down the trailer's squat forelegs and popped the air hoses
free. On cross-country jaunts, Mink, who lives in Howard County and
has been driving trucks for 15 years, sometimes hauls a load for four
or five days, but the trailer he was bringing in this morning had been
with him for a mere 400 miles, down from Long Island last night.

He hauls products of every possible variety and has no preference for
one load over another. The load he'd brought in today was 10 tons of
extruded steel display shelves designed to hold two-liter bottles of
Coca-Cola, ultimate destination Atlanta. Truck drivers have an unusual
acquaintance with loads like these, merchandise that is at once common
and obscure, dutiful little items that play an entirely unnoticed role
in the ongoing human convenience effort, but whose presence we would
surely miss if one day we found ourselves stooping to pick up our
bottles of Coca-Cola from the supermarket floor.

"The thing about this job," Mink said, "is you wind up seeing a lot of
little things and doodads you never thought about. Just about anything
you see in a store, you don't think about how somebody somewhere made
that stuff and that it probably got to where you're looking at it on a
truck." He removed the green package of menthol cigarettes from his
shirt pocket. "See, somebody made this cellophane, this little foil
deal here, this thing you yank on to get the plastic off. A lot of
people worked to put this thing together. My wife rode with me one
time when I was hauling a load for Fruit of the Loom, I was thinking
about all that, and I turned to her and said, 'Honey, do you know how
many women have had their hands in my pants?' "

Though Mink says he likes the freight company he drives for and does
not speak kindly about efforts to unionize the long-haul trucking
industry, an expression of dreamy amusement creeps across his face
when he considers the fix the country would be in if truck drivers
decided to strike. "People say we ought to shut down all the trucks
for a week and see what happens. What you'd get is a lot of empty
stores and a lot of pissed-off people. But still," he smiled and ran
his tongue across his teeth, "it'd really be something. Teach people a
little bit about who really keeps everybody in clothes and groceries."

[snip]